He’d stay the heck out of politics, apparently.
There is no such thing as a “Christian politics.” If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: “My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here” (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or program.
Uh, somebody had better call John McCain and let him know.
This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not. He avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, “Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him” (Matthew 22:21). He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state.
Those who want the state to engage in public worship, or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: “When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you” (Matthew 6:5-6). He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart.
Hey there, 700 club and evangelical mega-churches!
But doesn’t Jesus say to care for the poor? Repeatedly and insistently, but what he says goes far beyond politics and is of a different order. He declares that only one test will determine who will come into his reign: whether one has treated the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the imprisoned as one would Jesus himself. “Whenever you did these things to the lowliest of my brothers, you were doing it to me” (Matthew 25:40). No government can propose that as its program. Theocracy itself never went so far, nor could it.
The state cannot indulge in self-sacrifice. If it is to treat the poor well, it must do so on grounds of justice, appealing to arguments that will convince people who are not followers of Jesus or of any other religion. The norms of justice will fall short of the demands of love that Jesus imposes. A Christian may adopt just political measures from his or her own motive of love, but that is not the argument that will define justice for state purposes.
So Democrats lose, too.
Some people want to display and honor the Ten Commandments as a political commitment enjoined by the religion of Jesus. That very act is a violation of the First and Second Commandments. By erecting a false religion — imposing a reign of Jesus in this order — they are worshiping a false god. They commit idolatry. They also take the Lord’s name in vain.
That’s right, sinners.
Jesus was the victim of every institutional authority in his life and death. He said: “Do not be called Rabbi, since you have only one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, the one in heaven. And do not be called leaders, since you have only one leader, the Messiah” (Matthew 23:8-10).
If Democrats want to fight Republicans for the support of an institutional Jesus, they will have to give up the person who said those words. They will have to turn away from what Flannery O’Connor described as “the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus” and “a wild ragged figure” who flits “from tree to tree in the back” of the mind.
He was never that thing that all politicians wish to be esteemed — respectable. At various times in the Gospels, Jesus is called a devil, the devil’s agent, irreligious, unclean, a mocker of Jewish law, a drunkard, a glutton, a promoter of immorality.
The institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats.
Basically, Jesus and the actual words in the Bible kind of screw all of us who want the big JC on “our” side. In the words of the fantastic Tom Robbins,
Was Jesus an enlightened being who understood maya (the illusory nature of the material world) and the folly of seeking happiness through wealth, or was he merely a humorless, undersexed, masochistic proto-communist with an olive branch up his butt?
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The Jesus of the Gospels (all of them; not just the four canonical) and of tradition is an endlessly fascinating character. Little, if anything, is certain, but I think it’s reliable to say, as you do, that he’s nothing like the right wing theocrats have tried to make him.
I think, as an active Christian myself, Jesus is the things we want or need him to be, but whatever that may be, it is always finally inconclusive; we never quite get all of him under our control, which is one of his cooler attributes.
Along those same lines, it seems to me that people get a little carried away making God in our image instead of remembering that it is the other way around.
IMO it becomes much easier to be arrogant, even to the level of hubris, and one short step from there is making excuses for your hatred, violence, genocide,tyranny etc when you are too busy making Jesus your best friend and yourself a demigod.
I just picked up What Jesus Meant on Friday but have not started it yet. I look forward to reading it.
Jesus wasn’t political!? Have you read any of the Gospels in the context of the day? Jesus was always busting the chops of those in power. Who do you think the Saducees were? They were the lawmakers from the Jewish society. He was always calling into question the laws of the land and society. Remember that He was the One who said,”let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” That was a tremendously political statement. We tend to think in today’s political atmosphere instead of when He was alive on this earth. Take some time to read how much of a “political” figure He truely was and would be today if He were to walk our streets and congressional halls.
Like Silkpurse said, anyone who claims Jesus did *not* make political statements and even advocate political action hasn’t read the Gospels with any depth. Yes, He denied that He was merely a political ruler, but He made very strong statements on politics and ethics.
Yes, but he was in a society where Religion was intertwined with government. His problem with the Saducees and the Pharisees was hypocrisy, they were enforcing the religious laws on everyone else while not living them themselves. He didn’t bother with the Romans, the true political power of the day. The Romans weren’t Jewish, and they weren’t forcing their religion on their subjects in Judea. That’s why the Romans turned him over, because he wasn’t a threat to them. He was a threat to the religious government, and so they killed him over it.
If Separation fo Church and State had been the law of the land when Jesus was about, there would have been less political commentary in the gospels.
Given that much of the Gospels narrative is political in its contexts (then and now), I feel obliged to challenge Ragnell on one point; the Romans did not turn Jesus over to religious authorities, who then executed him. What appears most likely is Jesus was seized by some (not all) Jewish authorities and examined on an informal basis, then denounced as a political subversive to the Procurator Pilate, who took them as reliable. Pilate was a notoriously brutal commander in a regime noted for brutality and likely did not look very carefully into any charge of subversion; “Better safe than sorry; kill ‘em.” In any occupation there are local authorities who cooperate with the occupier “in the public interest.’ First century Palestine was no exception.
johnieB — I’ll take your word for it, my Biblical stuff is buried under a bunch of comic books right now.
Thanks, Ragnell; I wouldn’t have made such a BFD of it, but the idea that Jewish authorities were responsible, which originates in the Gospels, was the justification for two millenia of Anti-Semitism. We Christians need to face that, IMO.
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